Bad Movies;

Let me begin this discussion of the Earthsea movie by saying the original three Earthsea books are some of the best fantasy I've ever read. I'd put them on par with Amber or the Lord of the Rings. Very different style but they are definitely in the top echelons of anything I've ever read.

Probably the most important facet of these books is the character of Ged. In the beginning he's young and cocky. He grows and changes, but always the effects of who he is and has been stay with him. Even in the very end of the third book, there's a clear development of personnality there.

Ged's character is most interesting in his relationship with Tenar in the second book. (I pretend the fourth was never written and will hear no discussion of it. I don't care if you think its the bee's knees. Tell someone else.) Tenar, while she's Arha, is a person that doesn't know she's a person. She's young and empty, as she is named. Her relationship with Ged, the way the two of them work together and try to survive the Nameless Ones is fascinating. The Nameless Ones are fascinating. Ged and Arha's discussion of them towards the end of the Tombs of Atuan is fascinating. But it's the way those two foil each other that drives the book and makes Ged someone I'm willing to invest time and mental energy in. Because they don't get together in some assinine romance. The book develops who they are, builds character in both of them, and doesn't cop out by turning their emotions towards each other into trite overdone love. All through the book I could see how the easy road would have been making those two have some romance, and applauded U.G. When she didn't take that path. Arha, 13, and Ged, 30?, would have been a perverse, twisted couple but are amazing as partners, teacher and student. Perhaps the greeks were wrong and there is something new under the sun? Or perhaps we see in those two something that our culture is missing, relationships between men and women that aren't sexual or romantic without one of them being gay. (See why I dislike the fourth book so much?)

This brings us to one of the worst movies I've ever seen. A sin against man and God. I have no idea what the fuck U.G. was thinking to let that be made and am clinging to my respect of her to say she had been smoking crack or forgot to demand creative control. The king of the pirates? Retarded. The incredibly well done, understated scene in book one where Ged comes into his power? Retarded. The school of wizardry? Retarded Harry Potter knock off with corny special effects. Ogion is perhaps the only good part of that movie. Danny Glover gained mad props in my eyes for pulling something good out of the bastardized script.

But Arha, Arha, Arha. Oh. What. The. Fuck. Arha? The Eaten One? Was she even IN that filth? Let us neglect that the Nameless Ones were reduced from fascinating evil to retarded Dracula spawn from Van Helsing. Let us neglect to consider how they were imprisoned not by strange and mysterious magic but a big bar. The Nameless One's do not possess axes, appearantly. But Arha, she's their damn high priestess. She worships them. They ate her soul (as far as she knew at the time) and she was oka with that. The character that was so deep and yet so still on the surface, the amazing Ayn Rand beauty that was her mind reduced to the drek that the Sci Fi channel saw fit to put on film, the two together are the juxtaposition of ballet and mud. Everything that amazed me about her and Ged was gone.

In conclusion, this movie will be the bottom of my guage. This is the worst book adaption I have ever seen, and is zero in all things. With the exception of Danny Glover, because he managed to be pretty interesting. So it's two degrees celsius. It sucks.